Наталья Соколова – LIMBO (страница 9)
Almost the entire page of the textbook showed a red, haughty-looking camel with two humps, gazing at the viewer from under half-closed eyelids.
In short, Biology turned out to be not quite Biology, and the camel – not quite a camel. Among mages, the fluffy "ship of the desert" is considered an ancient archetype and an important occult symbol. The energy formed between the two humps of this animal, as between two poles of a magnet, "grounds" and locks a person in the limited dual world into which humans fell after the Fall, having tasted the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. An amulet made of camel hair destroys any witchcraft and makes it impossible: in the grounded physical reality, neither magic, nor regeneration, nor immortality simply exists.
The innate abilities of phoenixes and serpents can also be weakened by juniper resin smoke or dried and powdered mandrake root mixed with the juice of "nightshade" berries, also known as belladonna. However, these ingredients are extremely difficult to find nowadays, and it's even harder to find a chemist who would agree to work with them.
Speaking of Chemistry – it also turned out to be not quite Chemistry. We were told something about the types of primary elements – earth, water, fire, air, and ether. About sulfur and mercury, representing male and female principles. About the "sacred coitus" – the union of the sun and the moon, good and evil, left and right brain hemispheres, the phoenix and the dragon – to generate the Great Unity, that is, a state in which a person is capable of anything.
The teacher was a slender lady in her forties with a bright red mane of hair loose on her shoulders. When she sat at the desk, from afar it looked as if chemical reagents had exploded on the lectern and a fire had started. Perhaps not only her appearance is explosive, but also her temperament – I thought apprehensively. So this time I honestly tried to listen to the lecture, although the information was still very difficult to comprehend.
Transmutation? Tincture?? Alchemical androgyne??? I had a solid A in Chemistry at school, but here in the first few minutes it became clear – I can immediately forget about school knowledge. It seems the teacher said just that, but at first I didn't believe her – I think, all of them say that. And now I understand that she wasn't joking at all.
The course program was divided into two parts: the first semester was given to students for internal alchemy – changes in thoughts, feelings, perception of things, lifestyle; and the second involved working with solid matter – that is, external alchemy.
"So, we'll be able to turn pebbles into gold?" Jake couldn't hold back.
"Theoretically, yes, Brittlegill. You will."
"And practically?"
"And practically, I advise you to start small, since gold is the most dangerous element of the entire periodic table. Not mercury, not arsenic, not lead – no. It's gold. It generates greed and avarice inside the cauldron of an immature neophyte, and these two vices, as you know, are death for the soul. Like an ever-hungry fire, they will destroy all your achievements of the first year, and you'll have to start the transformation from scratch. Is that clear?"
"Clear," he sighed. "Getting rich won't work."
"It will work, Brittlegill. But true wealth has nothing to do with gold."
Jake, who during the break told us that he and his mother live very poorly and he's been scraping by on various part-time jobs since he was fourteen, wasn't impressed by Agatha Asher's answer. He continued to sadly examine his torn, stained shirt – probably calculating in his mind how many more hours he would have to work as a courier or dog walker to buy himself a new one.
I didn't have time to go to the cafeteria after the second period and thought I'd have a snack during the next break, but in Law class, they killed our appetite by showing us a thick code that we would have to study and memorize by heart in six months.
Although, if you believe the lecturer, we were lucky in this regard, and the ancient sets of rules were even more voluminous and confusing. The teacher proudly boasted to us of her collection of legislative acts and commentaries on them – so impressive that when I entered the classroom, I first thought I had mixed up the rooms and ended up in the library.
The walls of the room were stacked with books up to the ceiling. Many of them looked like real rarities: ancient, time-cracked bindings with ornate signatures in old or even magical languages.
"These are not just rules," the thin old woman with a gray bun on the top of her head was pontificating from her lectern. "This is the story of how phoenixes, serpents and humans learned to coexist peacefully, live and interact together without interfering with each other…"
In ancient times, people obeyed the immortals in everything, relying entirely on their will as the voice of heaven, but nowadays the situation has changed. "Peaceful coexistence" meant that it was the phoenixes and serpents who obeyed the laws written for them by humans. And even teaching at LIMBO is only for humans – eternal beings are by no means allowed in the educational process. I wonder then how people like us can be useful to the special services?..
"Ms. Williams," I raised my hand. "I have a question. Tell me, will we be taught here to kill people?"
"Nicole, you're going straight for the jugular," the granny tsked. "It's fine with me – the criminal code has tempered me – but it's better not to bluntly ask such a question to other teachers."
"And yet?.."
"You will we be taught here
"To hell?"
"Not to hell, but to HELL," Ms. Williams emphasized these letters with a special intonation, making scary eyes. "To the Highest Enforcement Lawkeeper League of the FSB. In other words, behind bars."
"And what sentence do they give to people like us for murder?"
"Article 1286 paragraph 33, my girl."
The silence in the classroom was replaced by the noise of rapidly turning pages.
"Life imprisonment!" someone breathed out from the back row.
"Well done, Mr. Witchman. You've earned a plus in the gradebook today."
"And five pluses – is that an A?.."
"Wait a minute," I interrupted my classmate. Witchman's pluses didn't concern me at all. "What do you mean life imprisonment?! We're immortal!"
"That's the point, Miss Antipova. That's the point. Therefore, accustom yourself to self-control from a young age, study His Majesty the Law, and be careful."
The smell of my favorite soup, which reached my nose from the lower floor, didn't help the situation. During the next break, I didn't go to the cafeteria again. Though Jake shared a sandwich with me – with cabbage, dill and soy cheese. He turned out to be a vegan – he hasn't eaten meat or milk since childhood.
So as not to offend my new friend, I crunched on the bland sandwich. The tension inside was growing proportionally to the increasing lack of understanding of what was going on. This probably isn't a joke or even a bad dream – although with each new lesson, I wanted to wake up more and more.
The Geography teacher's classroom resembled a pompous museum hall where an exhibition of fantastic creatures based on paintings by either Bosch or Dali was taking place. From every painting and sculpture, monsters were looking at us: demons, dragons and snakes, people with animal heads, animals with human heads, many-armed and many-legged creatures, many-eyed and many-headed, armed to the teeth, dancing, fighting, devouring each other or copulating. Many of them were depicted so realistically that it seemed they were about to come to life at any moment – jump off their pedestals or step out of the canvases.
Jake whispered that the geographer's hobby is to search all over the world for artists and sculptors who were "lucky" enough to come face to face with unusual creatures and capture them in their work. Most of the masters paid a high price for such a portion of inspiration – many lost their minds, and a few even took their own lives. And, I think, I could partly understand them.
After we spent the whole lesson drawing a contour map of the lower astral world, everyone became dejected – even the tireless Jake the Snake. Sighing over the atlas, the guy was scratching with his pencil lead, meticulously copying the hierarchy of entities: demons, devils, succubi, possessors, parasites, restless spirits, larvae… There turned out to be a great multitude of them in the lower astral – as if useful minerals on the map of Russia, and by the end of the lesson, they had sucked all the strength out of us.
The teacher – a tall, thin man with a big nose – at the very beginning of the class apologized and said that he urgently needed to step away for an important matter. He gave us the assignment, then sat down at the teacher's desk, folded his hands, closed his eyes, took a deep breath – and no longer reacted to anything. He probably really went very far away – to another city or country, or even to another planet – and couldn't hear us from there. He didn't return even when the bell rang with a muffled chime, and the students jumped up from their desks with relief.